Chris Brophy and Kimberley Starr win 2026 Dorothy Hewett Award
Chris Brophy and Kimberley Starr are the joint winners of the 2026 Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript and will split the $10,000 prize money. Each author will be offered a publishing contract with UWA Publishing.
Chosen from a shortlist of 6, Brophy’s winning entry was “Snow”, and Starr’s was “being made of stone”.
Judges Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Linda Martin, Samuel Bernard and Kate Pickard said “Snow” takes readers “back to the Australia of the early 1960s, experienced through the eyes of a young girl and her sister”.
They continued: “With their mother in a psychiatric hospital and father away for long periods at sea, they grow up in the home of their relatives in a small country town. Following a path laid down by ageing photographs, the novel takes us through a painful but often beautiful awakening.”
Brophy has worked as a teacher, librarian, arts administrator and cultural heritage researcher, and her short stories have been shortlisted for, or won, various awards. In 2016, she was the recipient of a Publisher Introduction Program residency at Varuna and has twice been shortlisted for Overland’s Fair Australia essay prize.
“It’s so hard to get your first big break as a writer, particularly in today’s competitive and cautious publishing climate,” said Brophy. “The Dorothy Hewett Award offers a rare opportunity for a newcomer like me, an older, debut novelist, to be published.”
The judges said Starr’s “being made of stone” “opens with a scene of confusion and desperation”.
The judges continued: “A mother has lost her daughter in a crowded art museum in a foreign country. But all is not as it seems. This lost child is the cipher of a deeper loss in the coherence of the world. While a motif of sculpture runs through the novel, the figures of stone cannot quite maintain the permanence they promise.”
Starr is a Melbourne writer and teacher, and the author of The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies (University of Queensland Press), winner of the Queensland Premier’s Emerging Queensland Author Manuscript Award and selected for One Book One Brisbane; The Book of Whispers, winner of the Text Prize; Torched (Pantera Press), shortlisted for the Davitt Award for Best Crime Novel; and most recently, The Map of Night (Pantera Press).
Said Starr: “In ‘being made of stone’, I wanted to tell the story of a woman who insists unyieldingly on her freedom, in the face of so many expectations placed on older women to calm down and to behave. Despite a failing memory, she flees to Italy, to be reunited with the art she has been passionate about for her entire life. […] It’s a story that means a great deal to me and a prize named for Dorothy Hewett feels like the perfect vehicle for sharing it.”
First awarded in 2017, the Dorothy Hewett Award is open to Australian writers across the categories of fiction, narrative nonfiction and poetry.
Last year’s winner was Mohammed Massoud Morsi for The Hair of the Pigeon.
Category: Awards Local news
